


The Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique

by scarredsodeep



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Beaches, Canon Compliant, Fluff, High School, Los Angeles, M/M, Masturbation, Modern Era, Romantic Gestures, Secret Admirer, Stalking, Tales from 2002, Tales from 2018, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 08:49:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13678326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: Mania-era Pete and high-school era Patrick have traumatic experiences with secret admirers.





	The Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique

**Author's Note:**

  * For [enleathe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/enleathe/gifts).



> Happy Valentine's Day, guys! Especially to my V-babe [enleathe](http://archiveofourown.org/users/enleathe), whose idea is the reason this story even exists, and the Petericks, who make my scabby gay heart believe in love.

 

 

_February 2018_

This whole time Pete’s been assuming the Valentines are from his kids, cheap cardboard hearts with Transformers and Pokemon and glittery stickers on them, but now he’s thinking he’d better reconsider.

He’s just peeled open a sticker-coated pink envelope. Inside it is a little card with a picture of Wolverine, his claws popped. The front says _Lookin’ sharp, bub._ Inside it someone has scrawled, _Valentine—nice ass._

He’s in his car. This latest, most disturbing Valentine fell out of the visor when he opened it to block the Los Angeles sun. He’s stuck in traffic, as usual, on his way to pick up Bronx from school. Pete leans over and pops his glovebox, where he’s stowed the other Valentines he’s found this week: the one they gave him at his favorite Starbucks when he showed up for his daily matcha, the one from between the strings of his bass in his studio, the one waiting in his locker at his trainer’s gym. (How clever, Pete thought. Meagan must be helping them, Pete thought.)

Now he’s not so sure. He rifles through the other Valentines: the provocatively posed Optimus Prime with hearts drawn all over in purple pen, the ‘I Chewse You’ Chewbacca that says _every day_ inside, the ‘I’d fight crime with you, Valentine!’ Teen Titans card that says _or commit it_. Okay, so that last one is a little weird, from a 9 year old. But 9 year olds are weird! Pete’s 9 year old especially is weird, likely from all the time spent around Pete.

Fundamentally, though? Pete doesn’t think either of his kids would give him a Valentine about his ass.

 

The next one is in his mailbox, which is comforting for approximately 1.73 seconds before Pete realizes there’s no stamp, no postmark. He tears it open with shaking hands and a pit in his gut. He’s being stalked, isn’t he? He’s being stalked by someone who knows his schedule and movements _way_ too well. He thinks about what went down with the Uries last year, how they had to move. He thinks about _Fatal Attraction_. Dead rabbits are gonna be the least of his worries.

The card depicts a Pokemon trainer winding up to throw a Pokeball. It reads _I like your moves, Valentine!_ in innocent, primary color block letters. Under that, it says

_Roses are red_

_Violets are blue_

_On Valentine’s Day_

_You’re gonna need lube_

Yep. Pete needs a bodyguard. They definitely need to move. He’s scared, right? Scared. Not turned on. This is a hard-on of pure terror.

 

Okay, if Pete’s being honest? He’s jerked off five times over these Valentines. He’s gonna start developing weird associations for children’s cartoons. The thrill that gets him off isn’t not knowing who they’re from—it’s the freedom to imagine they’re from anyone he wants.

Because, well. Aside from Meagan? There’s only one person Pete wants.

So if he fucks his own hand, squinting at the cards so the handwriting almost looks like Patrick’s? If he comes weak-kneed and scraped hollow, temporarily deaf like a bomb’s detonated next to his head, his heartbeat so thick in his throat his mouth tastes of copper? If he comes so hard he can’t breathe, has to bite down on his own tattooed wrist to keep from yelling, if he goes blind with it? If he pulls himself so hard he gets lost somewhere between the pleasure and the pain of it, knowing only that _toomuchtoomuchtoomuch_ is _justenough_?

If he does all that, with these cards spread out in front of him, imagining himself in a parallel dimension where Patrick could be the one who’s written them?

Well, what’s really so bad about that?

 

The MarioKart Valentine, found in his staff mailbox at the Decaydance office, basically pushes Pete over the edge. It’s a picture of Luigi crossing the finish line, the least yet most horribly sexual thing you can imagine, cheesily proclaiming _The way to my heart is a Kart!_ It’s the kind of Valentine Pete would probably buy himself just because of how awful it is.

Pete’s half-hard before he even opens the damn thing, his blood quickening in anticipation of what he’ll find. It is better and worse than anything he was imagining.

Inside it says,

_I’m not good at poems_

_but I am good at head_

_maybe you’ll let me suck your dick instead_

Pete is officially dead. He spends longer in a bathroom stall than he’d want to admit, til he comes messily over his own hand and chokes audibly with pleasure, all while someone uses the urinal across from him. He leans his forehead against the stall door, gasping, his pants undone and the task of cleaning himself up beyond his addled, orgiastic capabilities.

It is in this composed and dignified moment that Pete decides he needs to figure out who’s sending the Valentines at all costs.

 

 

_February 2002_

The list of things for which Patrick needs vengeance is a long one. Long, and prominently featuring Pete Wentz’s name. There have been pranks, public and private, ranging from merely inconvenient to actually degrading. There have been promises unkept, debts unpaid, a near-endless amount of owed gas money and lent five dollar bills. (Once, disastrously, a lent library card. Unless he gets $109.68 somewhere, Patrick can never show himself in the Glenview public library again. Honestly he doesn’t know what he was expecting.)

This, though? This might outdo the whole fucking list.

Exhibit A: Monday morning. Patrick proceeds to his locker in Senior Hall. He opens it, unsuspecting, looking to trade his 50-pound backpack for a slightly more reasonable stack of textbooks and binders. Out spills approximately two gallons of gold glitter and bright-pink sequin hearts. Patrick tracks glitter through the school all day, leaving a shine trail like some kind of artsy slug. His sneakers are so clogged with gold, they may be ruined forever. A single heart-shaped doily falls out too. Its pink construction paper center bears a single, blood-red lipstick kiss.

Exhibit B: Tuesday morning, a pile of Valentines burst out of his locker like admission letters to Hogwarts on a fucking Sunday. There are mounds of them. A small ocean. He tries to gather them up as quickly as he can, but he’s not fast enough. A particularly obnoxious lacrosse-playing jerk snags one. “Finally gonna lose your virginity, Stumph?” he asks. He slits the envelope open and reveals a Scooby Doo card that looks like a relic from Patrick’s third grade classroom. Patrick stuffs every card he can directly into the trash—but he must miss some, because jocks keeping guffawing and handing him stray children’s’ Valentines all day.

Exhibit C: Wednesday and Patrick opens his locker and leaps back like he expects lava to pour out of it. Honestly, glitter’s not that different than lava. Having a secret admirer is so fucking traumatic. Maybe he should be excited by all of this attention, but there’s nothing Patrick hates more than attention. Nothing terrible pours out of his locker, and Patrick thinks it’s finally over. Then he gets a rose delivered to him in homeroom. And AP chemistry. And English. By the end of the day, he has a fucking bouquet.

Wednesday night is band practice. Patrick obviously does not bring the roses. Pete Wentz in a striped hoodie leans on his shoulder, in his personal space, grinning and grinning. “Heeeeeey Patty,” he sing-songs. “Do you already have a Valentine? Because I’ve been meaning to ask you to be mine.”

Patrick punches him until he stops.

Exhibit D: Whoever the secret admirer is, maybe she saw how horrified and embarrassed he’s been thus far and has backed off. Maybe she has decided not to up the ante. This is what he tells himself, all the way to school on Thursday. He skips his locker entirely. He’s got everything he needs in his backpack, more or less. There’s not that much high school left. Does he really ever need to open his locker again?

He eyes the oddball fringe girls suspiciously all day, knowing they are the demographic most likely to be courting a Velcro sneakers-wearing nerd like him so arduously. He is wary of sudden movements. As the day wears on with no humiliating demonstrations, he starts to relax.

Then a pizza guy shows up in the cafeteria during his lunch hour and yells out, “PATRICK ‘SUGAR SWINGER’ STUMP? I’ve got an extra-large heart-shaped pizza for one PATRICK ‘SUGAR SWINGER’ STUMP.”

On the pizza, pepperonis and olives spell out _U + ME + FRIDAY?_

Patrick throws it away.

Exhibit E: Friday. Patrick tries to convince his mom he has a fever, can’t possibly go to school. “You’ve only got another two months before you’re 18,” she tells him. “Let me be a tyrant a little longer.” At least he’s quick enough to dodge her forehead kiss. He goes to school.

Nothing explodes out of his locker. There isn’t a ticker-tape parade with an inflatable Patrick float. No dance troupe breaks into a coordinated musical number in his math class. No singing telegram interrupts chem lab. Still, Patrick dare not relax. Whoever she is, she’s going to strike today. The pizza told him: he’s a marked man. Nowhere is safe.

He decides not to risk the cafeteria at lunch. He takes his sandwich from home out into the front courtyard, figuring he can sit at the picnic table near the flagpole with the stoners until the threat of public heart-shaped humiliation has passed. When a familiar busted red Acura rumbles up to the front of the school, Patrick has a moment where he’s actually relieved. That shows you how stupid he is: for a second he thinks, _my good buddy Pete is here, my troubles are over_. Then the driver of Pete’s car leans on the horn. Stevie Wonder’s _Part-Time Lover_ starts blaring out the speakers.

“Be my Valentine, Patrick Stump!” Pete puts the car in park to lean out the passenger window. He flings handfuls of Hershey’s kisses like he’s the queen of a beauty pageant presiding over a small-town parade. “I’ve been asking all week!” he yells while Patrick, horrified, scoops up his sandwich and backpack and makes to scuttle away.

“Patrick!” Pete hollers. “Baby, don’t leave me hanging! Let me take you out tonight and show you how much I loooove you!”

The last thing Patrick hears before he reaches the ‘safety’ of the school? It’s Pete singing along with Stevie, and not doing him one bit of justice. “We are strangers by day, lovers by night!” Pete screams like a guy who grew up in hardcore bands.

If Patrick thought he got teased over some Power Rangers and Ninja Turtles cards? If he thought he got hazed over a _pizza_? Oh, it’s nothing compared to the abuse he’s gonna take now. Patrick never wants to see Pete again. He’s gonna have to flee the country.

Exhibit F: Even though Valentine’s is over by Monday, no one— _no one_ —at school has forgotten.

Patrick is called Part-Time Lover til graduation day. He doesn’t doubt that if he shows up at his 10-year reunion, they’ll be saying it then too.

 

 

_February 2018_

_Valentine,_

_I’m coming_

_for you_.

That’s all the last card says. Red sharpie scrawled on white cardstock, stuffed in a white envelope sealed with a single anatomical heart sticker. Pete can’t tell if it’s meant to be sexy or murdery, and honestly, it’s crossing his wires a little to experience it as both.

He finds it tucked under his windshield wiper outside Eggslut. He’s been inside less than 20 minutes. His skin prickles cold, knowing that whoever is doing this could still be nearby. He locks his car doors no less than 6 times. He wonders why he hasn’t, like, called the police.

He wonders if the handwriting really does look like Patrick’s, or if he’s just gone boner-mad from all the blood deprivation to his brain over the last week. His egg sandwich turns queasily in his stomach while he drives to the gym.

He’s feeling better by the time he emerges an hour and a half later, sparkling with sweat, smelling less than excellent, squinting in the bright California sun. The very last thing he expects is for Patrick to pull up to the curb in a gleaming red convertible full of mylar heart-shaped balloons.

Pete stands there speechless. Patrick, grinning in an unhinged manner, thumbs the stereo. Sound spills out into the street. It takes Pete a few beats to recognize it as a Stevie Wonder song. Patrick leans over and flings a handful of glitter in Pete’s stunned face.

“Payback, Valentine!” Patrick crows.

Pete gets into the car, because he has no idea what else to do. “What is happening?” he manages to ask.

Patrick turns down the stereo a little. Frowning, he asks, “Don’t you remember? Your infamous Valentine’s prank? You showed up in your stupid red car and played Stevie Wonder and threw chocolate at me.”

Some asshole behind them starts honking—it is LA, after all—so Patrick pulls into traffic. What Pete says next is nearly lost to road noise. “Oh, you mean the day you rejected me.”

Patrick does a double take. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I left surprises for you all week, like, as John Cusak as possible, right? And then I showed up at your school to like, sweep you away and profess my undying affection and whatever. I had tickets for this romantic dinner cruise on the Spirit of Chicago.” Pete laughs a little at the memory. If he recalls right, he was wearing a tuxedo t-shirt. He really had no idea what he was doing, and he’s gotten only marginally less clueless about romance in the intervening years. “You made the right call, running away. I gave the tickets to my sister. She said it was incredibly cheesy.”

There is a long quiet, filled only by the voice of Stevie Wonder and the smell of car exhaust. Balloons squeak together in the wind. Patrick is frowning at the road, a look of concentration on his face that doesn’t match the demands of the current driving situation.

At last, Patrick says, “I thought you were making fun of me.”

Pete laughs out loud at that. “Are you actually insane? Making _fun_ of you? I was so fucking in love with you.”

Patrick bites his lip, still staring intensely at the mostly empty road. They clip past palm trees and on-ramps to the freeway. The hills give way to mountains, far off in the gasoline-smeared smog. The sun bites Pete’s skin. The horizon reads _HOLLYWOOD_.

“I thought you knew how I felt and thought it was funny,” Patrick finally says. Then he adds, “…I should tell you, this was all, uh. Sort of an elaborate revenge scheme.”

“Like Kill Bill?” Pete asks lightly. It costs him nothing he hasn’t gambled away long ago, believing that to Patrick this means nothing.

“Pretty much exactly like Kill Bill,” Patrick agrees. His voice is heavy with relief. Relief, and something slicker.

“So are you gonna murder me with a guitar sword now, or…?” Pete jokes.

His voice still ringing strange, Patrick says, “I was planning on using the hook hand, but I think under the circumstances I should probably let you live. What with this all apparently being a huge, 16-year misunderstanding and all.”

The song has long since ended. It’s silent, save for slipstream.

“Can’t believe I’ve known you 16 years,” says Pete after a while. He very specifically does not point out that Patrick is still driving, still taking them somewhere. The further they wind into the hills, the less it seems aimless. If they name it, they can’t pretend it’s an accident anymore. That’s always been the rule of Patrick.

“Yeah. You’re my best friend, Pete,” he says.

“Me you too, buddy,” Pete says. He tips his head back, listens to the balloons smack together in protest as the convertible picks up speed. Patrick’s merged onto the 405. It is reckless and regular at once to tell the smog-and-sun above, “I love you. Always’ve loved you.”

“Yeah, I think I’m starting to get that,” Patrick says wryly.

They drive til it’s obvious they have a destination. Somewhere in Santa Monica, Pete thinks, unless Patrick’s intending to just keep following the coast til he makes good on Pete’s longtime threat and runs away to Mexico.

Pete’s skin’s still burned raw from his own palm. He’s still got those cards stuffed into the glovebox of his car, the meter on which has surely expired by now. (He figures whatever happens next is worth a few more parking tickets.) He’s not going to forget what Patrick wrote, whether this is Kill Bill or Roman Holiday. He finally works up the courage to just ask. “So those things that you wrote… like, all the terrifying lewd stuff that made it sound like you were going to fuck me and then kill me praying-mantis style… that was part of the revenge?”

Patrick laughs, too fast too loud. “Yes. The revenge,” he agrees.

Patrick exits the freeway, which Pete does not comment on. Instead he says, “...Some of it was pretty specific.”

“Was it?”

Pete says nothing. He looks out the window. Palisades Park. Patrick’s taking him to the beach. He thinks of sand, grit between toes, and red chafed knees. Pete can feel the beach in his whole body.

Patrick parks. He hasn’t looked at Pete in a good thirty minutes. He turns off the car. The engine ticks towards silence and he mumbles, “I mean. Some of it maybe I meant.”

The funny thing is, in 16 years, in some ways Patrick hasn’t changed at all.

Pete hops out of the car. Patrick is startled enough by the sudden movement that he jerks to look at Pete, his face red as sunburn with the grudging truth he’s finally told. “C’mon,” Pete urges. “There’s no Lake Michigan cruise waiting out there, but there’s a pretty good ocean.”

Patrick gets out of the car. He takes Pete’s hand. He allows himself to be led to the beach.

“So I heard a rumor you were good at giving head,” Pete teases as they wade into the rocky surf. They’re still just relentlessly moving forward, as if with enough motion, no one will have to think twice about what they’re doing. Maybe they’ll swim in search of the horizon. Maybe they’ll never come back to land.

“You have no idea,” Patrick murmurs. Pete turns to gape at him in shock, and Patrick takes the opportunity to shove Pete bodily into the water.

February cold, Pete crashes into the sea. His mouth fills with salt, tasting like other things. If he were a selkie, he’d pull Patrick down and they could drown together. But Pete’s a man instead. Perhaps they can do something else together in the waves.

Pete rises from the water on his knees. He grins up at Patrick, all canines and dripping hair in his eyes. “I’m not the worst at it either,” he says. “Let me show you.”

He tugs Patrick by the hip pockets. They both sink into the sea.

It isn’t til much later, when they’re spread out to dry, wrecked and ruined and only slightly dressed on the sunbaked sand, that Pete remembers to say, “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

Patrick laughs. He squeezes Pete’s hand. He says, “What, no card?”

 

 

_xoxo_


End file.
